Alexander and Lucas watched as the first missile fired up its drive and zipped toward the distant target. A sensor inside the cube ensured the missile could track its location since the target was only ten feet across and covered in stealth armor, making it almost impossible to detect with the missile's normal onboard sensors.

As the weapon crossed the halfway point to the target, two things happened. First, the field on the cube engaged, then the missile overloaded the small reactor onboard.

The energy wasn't quite enough to turn the entire warhead into plasma as it struck the surface of the cube, but the nearby Fishbone transport did record the impact.

"Did you make plasma missiles?" Lucas asked.

"A first attempt at them. I don't know if they will be a viable weapon anytime soon, however. A bit too expensive, when a simple high explosive can do almost the same thing at a fraction of the cost and time."

"I don't know, Alex. I saw the damage that Harlow's plasma missiles did. I don't think a normal missile could have done that."

"You're not wrong," Alexander said in agreement, "But if the results of this test prove successful, it'll render plasma weapons as no more dangerous than any other weapon."

"Fair enough," Lucas admitted. "You may want to call in your bots to stabilize the target, though. It looks like the impact of the missile sent it spinning."

A few bots were deployed from the Fishbone ship and quickly restored the target to a stable orbit. They were also able to give the object a much closer examination.

Lucas whistled in approval. "That plasma should have sheared off a few of the outer layers, but it barely even deformed them. You can see the dark burn marks from the plasma, and the scratches along the burned surface where the remains of the missile impacted it, but all the layers are intact. Considering the armor is designed to ablate, that's ridiculous. Do you have shock sensors inside the cube?"

Alexander had a whole host of sensors fitted to the interior to measure shock, thermal transfer, and other kinds of effects. He brought the sensor readings up on the main display.

They both winced at the shock load.

"I hope that's because the cube is so small; otherwise, an impact of that magnitude would pulp anyone aboard."

Alexander nodded his avatar at Lucas' statement.

The thermal readings were outstanding, however. The internal sensor barely reached hot enough to burn bare skin, let alone the ridiculous temperatures carried inside the sphere of plasma.

"Looks like the next participant is approaching," Alexander pointed as the automated Stingray came around the moon from the opposite direction.

The ship fired a burst of five rounds from its FE cannon and then launched its anti-ship missile, before turning away and heading back.

The five rounds slammed into the cube, creating brilliant sparks of white as they impacted one after another.

Once again, the target was sent spinning, but he kept the bots clear as the missile impacted the target in a much more explosive way.

Lucas let out a whine of complaint. "You should have done a ground-based test first."

"You just wanted to be the first to shoot at it," Alexander replied with a chuckle.

"Damn straight," Lucas laughed. "You going to stabilize it again?"

Alexander shook his avatar. "No. I only have one more test."

He activated the final modified missile and turned off the field generator aboard the target. Instead of fully dispersing as it struck the armor, the armor broke away, doing its best to stop the ravening plasma energy, but a small area in the center of the impact must have been weakened enough for a portion of the plasma to burn through.

Backed by the missile's body slamming into the armor, the plasma stream acted like a jet and sliced through the reactor casing. A moment later, the entire target was reduced to slowly expanding plasma.

The amount of plasma contained in the missiles was around the same amount that Alexander estimated one of the Shican bolts to carry. In a real fight, one shot would not have punched through a ship's armor. The cube was composed of much thinner plates, just for testing purposes.

The impact and fracturing damage probably would have been about the same, however.

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"I would say that's a monumental success," Lucas said as he watched the plasma slowly cool in the vacuum of space. "How long to retrofit the fleet with the new… Uh, what are you calling this stuff?"

"I thought about calling it field-enhanced armor, or FE armor, but I don't want people to realize our weapons and armor have anything in common. So, I think I'm going to call it energized armor. To retrofit the fleet, we're going to need to pull the entire outer layer of armor off and replace it with the alien carbon composite armor. Do we even have enough for a capital ship, yet?"

"You're certain it can't be used with the corporate composite? Even if it can't dissipate heat nearly as well, it should be able to mitigate damage somewhat."

Alexander sighed. "You're right. If it can give our ships any advantage, we need to use it. I'll build a second target using the corporate armor and test that."

The second test took place a few days later, and that time, Alexander just carried them out himself. The field did enhance the armor's stability, but a single plasma missile was able to punch through the thin layer of the armor even with the field active. It was definitely an upgrade over the plasma bolts cutting through armor like butter, but it just highlighted the corporate armor's inability to deal with the heat quickly enough.

Still, Lucas had been correct. It would help. A ship's armor was much thicker, and it might be able to take three or four shots in the same spot before the plasma cut through the outer layer of armor, which was the only layer protected by the field.

That might be all that was needed to save a ship. While a laser could target the same spot over and over with relative ease, the plasma bolts had a much harder time accomplishing that as a ship maneuvered. The bolts were much slower than a laser, but faster than an FE cannon round. According to Krieger's mission report, the BSE's lasers outranged the Shican's plasma weapons by almost a third as well, giving them a tactical edge in range.

Alexander didn't think for a moment that the Shican were going to be defeated by one upgrade, but it was another piece on the board in their favor.

With the tests on the energized armor complete, Alexander checked on the ongoing fusion reactor tests in The Pit.

The weapons testing site had been dormant for some time, which made it the perfect spot to run the highly volatile tests.

Both reactors had been running at full tilt for a little over two weeks. According to the test log, there had been a few close calls, but the computers had managed to rein in the field before the plasma got out of control.

Those close calls would have been enough for Alexander to shelve the project during normal times, but he let it keep running. He was glad he had. The longer the system monitored the field, the better it got at predicting the flare-ups. Those close calls had occurred during the first week of the test, but not a single one had come close during the second week.

Alexander believed it was time to see what the programs were truly capable of. First, he backed up copies of both of them on the Academy's core. Then he started forcing additional fuel into the reactors, bringing them up to a hundred and ten percent of their operating capacity.

Both monitoring systems struggled to deal with the additional power, but they held on. Since he was watching their log, he could see that each of them was frantically trying to trigger the overload safeties that they were programmed for.

The only problem was that Alexander had removed the physical overrides for these tests that would allow the systems to vent safely. He wanted to see how the self-learning programs would deal with the emergency.

The first to act was the one monitoring the ball reactor. It adjusted the field strength in a certain direction, and the unstable plasma found the easiest route out, melting a hole straight into the ground.

It was an interesting solution to the problem, considering the programs weren't given external sensors, just a layout of the ship they were supposed to be powering. Alexander glanced at the holographic image of the ship and a red line that showed where the vented plasma would have gone.

It was a cargo bay, and the safest possible route, even if it had damaged the vessel quite a bit. The simulation that was running alongside the test stated there were five casualties. Mostly due to the loss of atmosphere, but one unlucky simulated individual had been in the path of the plasma when it was vented.

Considering the entire ship would have been destroyed if the program hadn't acted, killing a few people to save the rest was the lesser of two evils.

Alexander focused on the other reactor. The program was still attempting to stabilize the issue, but it had gone about it in a completely different way than its cohort. It had more options to play with, however.

The first thing it did was vent as much plasma through the thrusters as possible, but it wasn't enough to keep up with the additional fuel coming in. The program decided to put a stop to the fuel flow. A momentary flicker of the field strength allowed a tiny amount of plasma to lash against the internal fuel regulator, melting the opening closed halfway.

From that point on, it was able to flush the rest of the plasma out of the reactor, eventually causing the reaction to stall.

Alexander didn't know whether to be impressed or terrified that the computer thought hitting the fuel inlet with energetic plasma was the best approach. It could have easily triggered the fuel into a fusion state that fed back through the lines. He did some quick math and realized that the additional fuel pressure actually reduced the possibility of a runaway fusion reaction occurring inside the line.

The bots out at The Pit made repairs to the reactors, and the tests restarted a few hours later. The ball reactor was reduced to eighty percent output due to the patch job on its casing, but it would give Alexander much-needed info on how well a repaired reactor could operate.

Alexander would be continuing the tests on the reactors and throwing more emergency situations their way until the fleet returned. He wasn't going to stick any experimental reactors aboard a ship until he knew they were as safe as he could possibly make them.

That being said, Alexander was almost done with the one for Lucas's unmanned test. He looked at the build log. The Stingray Mk3 would be coming off the printer in a few days. The new design iteration came with the upgraded reactor and the field emitters in the armor for the defensive field, based on the ideal configuration that Lucas and his team managed to work out.

Unfortunately, it was too late to add the energized armor to the design, but the production model would receive it. He just needed to ensure that some sort of impact absorption was added to the pilot seats until he figured out the motion-dampening problem.